Terence McKenna Quotes

If I can see my own recollections, like many adolescents, I was a Platonic realist. I believed in the reality of ideas, of the big nouns, and believed that one's life was determined by the ideas of the true, the good, and the beautiful which one held.

What is the fundamental hypothesis of science, the fundamental philosophy? We stated it in the first chapter: the sole test of the validity of any idea is experiment. ... If we are told that the same experiment will always produce the same result, that is all very well, but if when we try it, it does not, then it does not. We just have to take what we see, and then formulate all the rest of our ideas in terms of our actual experience.

Number is the ruler of forms and ideas, and the cause of gods and daemons.

Have you ever been experienced? Not necessarily stoned, but beautiful.

I finally realized that this 'place' that I kept bursting into [on a psychedelic experience] was somebody's idea of a playpen.

If you have a clear idea of a soul, you will have a clear idea of a form; for it is of the same genus, though a different species.

There are beds and tables in the world - plenty of them, are there not? But there are only two ideas or forms of them - one the idea of a bed, the other of a table.

Our ideas are the offspring of our senses; we are not more able to create the form of a being we have not seen, without retrospect to one we know, than we are able to create a new sense. He whose fancy has conceived an idea of the most beautiful form must have composed it from actual existence.

Every great creative idea, formulated as a philosophy, has a social setting - in time, in a geographical location, in a political economy, in a matrix of interests and knowledge. It is not a free-swinging phenomenon like a balloon without moorings. It is not produced in a vacuum and, being creative, it does not work in a vacuum. Nurtured on things experienced and things known, it reaches out toward the unknown like a flower on a stalk growing out of the soil.

What the psychedelic thing can be seen as, when it's done with plants, as a return to Gaia, an immersion in the feminine.

[DMT] raises all the questions in a hurry. It's so intense and so oriented toward the other and the visual and the hallucinogenic that it isn't really like a drug. It's more like an event that you ran into. You just came around a corner and there was the unspeakable.

For Emily Dickinson every philosophical idea was a potential lover. Metaphysics is the realm of eternal seduction of the spirit by ideas.

By passing into the psychedelic phase, the space-faring phase, the entire species is passing into adolescence.

This idea is more surely understood by interrogation; WHAT DO I KNOW? which I bear as my motto with the emblem of a pair of scales.

Part of what being involved in the psychedelic experience is about is reclaiming your own experience.

When we are exalted by ideas, we do not owe this to Plato, but to the idea, to which also Plato was debtor.

Just because an idea is true doesn't mean it can be proved. And just because an idea can be proved doesn't mean it's true.

The idea of God grew side by side with the idea of materialism.

Philosophizing is a process of making sense out of experience.

Plato is philosophy, and philosophy, Plato,--at once the glory and the shame of mankind, since neither Saxon nor Roman have availed to add any idea to his categories.

We learn geology the morning after the earthquake.

I will just say, appropriation is an intellectual idea until it happens to you. It's a philosophy, and it's got its own intellectual framework. Then there's what happens when it's your photograph. Then it's personal, and that's all I'll say.

The genius of the Platonists, is intoxicating to the student, yet how few particulars of it can I detach from all their books.

If you don't generalize you don't philosophize.

Ideas come as you walk, Nietzsche said. Walking dissipates thoughts, Shankara taught.